Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Spring/Summer 2010 - The WHAT?! Award

Earlier this month, I had suggested that the anime blogging community take up some sort of method to gauge how well this year has been. Granted, this year is only half over—well, more like 3/4ths, as the winter season will likely start in January 2011, and I got on this bus late. However, Crunchyroll called it "Winter 2009" three seasons ago, so I stick with that initial assessment.

That being said, I present to you the first of my half-year awards by looking at the things that made us go...

The What?! Award was defined as the award "to be reserved for the double-take of the half-year", "the show that left us speechless, either in a good or a bad way".

Let's face it—the best laid plans are never laid out perfectly. Normally, shows are expected to perform for certain niche groups, but sometimes there are just things we don't expect from an anime series. (I mean, there was an animated short series about talking poop in Winter '09!) Here are the three things that surprised us enough to spit our Mitsuya Cider.

3. Ketsu-Inu ("Bum Dog")

Yes, if you survived those aforementioned vignettes about talking poop, you're ready for a small-eyed dog whose dotted cheeks and tongue make it look like a pair of buttocks. Thank the Lord that these were short episodes that weren't meant to be serious. Even the preview unveiled at the Tokyo International Anime Fair last year seemed...rather lax. I mean, we love you, Japan, but there are just some things that shouldn't be animated.

There were lots of shows about maidens and harems this half-year, plenty of them mindless as ever. Strike Witches came out with a sequel to declare another "war on pants", while sisters were trying to fondle up their brothers' yum-yums (kissxsis, Aki Sora), but none were as mindless as the first episode of Shin Koihime Musô: Otome Tairan. It takes a village of idiots to not know when a woman is preggers, yet to know exactly how to solve a former enemy's inconvenient nekomimi troubles.

A little intelligence from the female warriors, please? I mean, it made the Ikkitôsen sequel palpable by comparison...

Surprisingly, the biggest spit-take of the season for me was the biggest surprise of the season (more on that to come in other award presentations). I was totally ready to dismiss Mitsudomoe as an attempt to make a raucous, absurd Minami-ke clone, but I was totally unprepared for the jocularity to come. Mitsudomoe is totally rude, crude, nude, and shrewd, but it was all of the completely bizarre misunderstandings stemming from potty/breast/panties humor that made it all worth its weight in gold (or whatever the equivalent measure would be in pee).

A big NSFW series in the end, but totally worth checking out. Just be sure you're not drinking milk when you watch scenes such as these...